The Lounge is rated PG. If you're about to post something you wouldn't want your
kid sister to read then don't post it. No flame wars, no abusive conduct, no programming
questions and please don't post ads.

1. The lounge is for the CodeProject community to discuss things of interest to the community, and as a place for the whole community to participate. It is, first and foremost, a respectful meeting and discussion area for those wishing to discuss the life of a Software developer.

The #1 rule is: Be respectful of others, of the site, and of the community as a whole.

2. Technical discussions are welcome, but if you need specific programming question answered please use Quick Answers[^], or to discussion your programming problem in depth use the programming forums[^]. We encourage technical discussion, but this is a general discussion forum, not a programming Q&A forum. Posts will be moved or deleted if they fit better elsewhere.

4. No politics (including enviro-politics[^]), no sex, no religion. This is a community for software development. There are plenty of other sites that are far more appropriate for these discussions. Or if you must, use the Back Room[^] - but enter at your own risk.

5. Nothing Not Safe For Work, nothing you would not want your wife/husband, your girlfriend/boyfriend, your mother or your kid sister seeing on your screen. For those discussions where you wish to be a little more frank, use the Soapbox[^]

6. Any personal attacks, any spam, any advertising, any trolling, or any abuse of the rules will result in your account being removed.

7. Not everyone's first language is English. Be understanding.

Please respect the community and respect each other. We are of many cultures so remember that. Don't assume others understand you are joking, don't belittle anyone for taking offense or being thin skinned.

We are a community for software developers. Leave the egos at the door.

This is how I understand how the RSA algorithm works. I'd like to know if this is accurate.

- Entity A wishes to receive coded messages, and so generates a pair of prime numbers P & Q of a certain size (an easy task for that size), multiplies them together to get a composite prime N = P * Q and as well uses P & Q to derive (via a certain algorithm) another number E (both also easy tasks), and publishes these numbers N & E while keeping P & Q secret.

- Entity B wishes to send Entity A a coded message, and so uses the published numbers N & E to code the message (also an easy task).

- Entity A receives the message, and because A has knowledge of the secret numbers P & Q, the decryption is an easy task.

- Entity C nefariously intercepts and wants to decode the message. However, to decode the message, P & Q must be known - but the only way to uncover these numbers from N is to do a prime factorization on N, which for the size of N is an astronomically difficult task.

- When Entity B sends Entity A the coded message, the veracity of Entity B being the sender is proven in the same way, albeit as the converse.

Well, in ideal world students might be allowed to choose what they want, but in our substantially non-ideal real world a set of choices for a student in the Upper East Side Manhattan (for e.g.) is very different from the one living in distant village somewhere in Alaska. The online education is practically the only way to effectively address such sort of ZIP code differences. Plus, it’s not just “one size fits all”: online education comes in many sizes, like 1280x800, 1366x800, 1920x800, 2560x1440, etc.

Buuut... it takes only one student to point out an error and correct it for the whole class. Whereas in online, the other students may never hear about it.

I know I probably came off as a bit of a know-it-all (I did know it all ; I was eighteen at the time), but there was a class I took in college where I knew a few things the teacher didn't -- he was familiar with Apple, but the college had a PDP-11. I felt it MY DUTY to provide system-specific clarification to the class.

Socialisation is good to an extent - when it becomes 'learning to conform and abide by the rules' it destroys the creative spirit and, as has been shown in many cases, young boys do better if they are not sitting down for most of the day.
I remember building balsa wood aircraft with one teacher and visiting an airfield where we got to sit in a Cessna 172 and try the controls - I learnt a heck of a lot more about engineering and aeronautics through that than I did about biology through reading stuffy 1970's textbooks.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

I did very poorly academically despite or perhaps because of being sent to a fee paying British boarding school for 10 years.
It was not until during my university years when I decided to educate myself in the areas I was actually interested that I actually started to learn anything of use(I became a voracious reader of literature - Roman, Greek, Victorian and more modern works - and started to learn for once).
As far as I was concerned the 10+ years of school was pretty much a complete waste of time - what I learnt at school, that was of any interest or use to me, I could probably have learnt in 6 months.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

Time wasted at school could be huge, but not exactly 100%. Systemic education is still rather important in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) area, either it's implemented in regular classrooms, or in the virtual ones.

PS. frankly, eLearning should be implemented on a mass scale long time ago: what is that special they are doing in the classrooms that cannot be done online?

I don't believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution; however, online education should certainly have a part to play but the friendships, sports and social activities that are a vitally important part of child development cannot be done online.

"Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

So, let me get this right...a service temporarily unavailable error causes a service temorarily unavailable error...this could take a while...

Oh, you think an empty catch block is your ally, but you merely adopted bad code. I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn’t see good code until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but a hindrance!

I have an old blog, started circa 2010, last article 2012. I wish to reinvent and renew this blog, and would like to 'hide' the old articles. I thought it a perfect idea to shift them into CP, as new articles. Is that type of thing OK with members? There will be no plagiarism or duplication, or even sharing the articles elsewhere.

I want to shift the emphasis of my blog, www.thepraxis.co.za[^], toward more theoretical and academic discussion (with the occasional libelous, mouth-frothing rant), and concentrate my more practical efforts, i.e. coding inventions, how-tos, etc. and concentrate the more practical articles on CodeProject and CodeGuru.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. - Oscar Wilde